I think this is a good example of how pro-privacy arguments should be framed. It is takes the varied aspects and complex implications of tracking users across the web (or even in the real world), and distills it down into an easy to understand concept.
When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
Agreed. I think the audience matters too -- different messages appeal to different people.
My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they're doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn't always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it's too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else's. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn't mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.
I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there's no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he's sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He's not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn't want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That's when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.
> I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window.
I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.
I went to a debate once, in which the former head of GCHQ (British equivalent of the NSA) argued that because agents weren't literally listening to people's phone calls, like the Stazi did, mass digital surveillance is fine. And unfortunately for many people this argument works. Human eavesdropping is obviously a
problem at a viceral level, because somebody you don't know listening to you is frightening. The fact that digital surveillance gives power to its possessor just as much as human surveillance did is hard to get across.
Privacy is simple. The "watcher" always without exception has a massive power imbalance in their favor. The first and often only line of defense against that power imbalance is the right to privacy.
Right. Apart from the sci-fi tropes, the extreme drama, and aesthetics, it's a spitting image. A great deal of effort is quietly spent on social control, keeping things as they are, and extracting value from people-as-cows, both here and there. Any technology in a position to add robustness to that system, to reduce its upkeep effort, or improve its efficiency at generating wealth for the privileged is likely to succeed, so it's reasonable to think some of the not-yet-here but possible aspects their world will make it to ours in time.
Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.
Yes, this was great. I think the slogans "Privacy is the right to be imperfect" and "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
> "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.
Seems to me that using word 'privacy' for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term 'privacy' for private interactions and use some other (like 'non-accountability') for public ones.
Considering we're see "social heating" if not "social fire" all around us, I'm not sure this is informs people correctly.
My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where "BLM" is just earnest liberals as you'd expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren't all that bothered by the situation).
Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates "microchipping" people is a cartoonish example but there's a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don't have).
If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).
I believe that social cooling is a thing, and I also believe that the observations you're making are legitimate. Three points that might reconcile these ideas:
1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don't-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they've experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.
2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the "social fire" crowd - they don't understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don't think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.
3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to 'social fire'. People who don't have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone's decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.
this is the kind of privacy discourse I am interested in. Whether an individual can find my ssn, location, credit cards, or whatever personal information is not really what I am thinking about when I think about “protecting my privacy” but rather reducing my data emissions that compose these ratings. in my experience it’s hard to get this across to people who are not familiar though, always get the “I have nothing to hide :) what are you trying to hide?” response. Will try this “social cooling” framework next time. maybe a little less daunting as an entry point than “surveillance capitalism”
I never understood this. Economics 101 or 102 maybe tells us that our consumer welfare will be reduced if firms have less uncertainty about how much they can extract from us. You can make this argument more sophisticated in networks, regarding ads, regarding quality and what have you. But the basic case should be enough to convince you that amazon knowing every detail about you is not going to help you. At all.
It is enough in the present, but I'm not sure that will be enough in the future. People have always been distrustful of faraway strangers hiding their faces in hoodies and sunglasses. Similarly for a good credit score you need a history of taking and paying off loans.
You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.
> When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
We were 'almost' there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).
If there's anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it's that Deep-learning / AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc.
Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
I’ve heard this story too
when growing up. I belong to one of the last generations born in the German Democratic Republic. A quite prominent element of our History and German lessons in the 2000s was critical reading of historic news and caricatures, we did these analyses in exams up to A-levels. Propaganda was a big topic, not only when learning about the Third Reich. One reason certainly was that all our teachers spent most of their lives in the GDR system.
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
Remember me a joke, in USSR to know the truth you only need to put a NOT in front of an article of the Pravda, because are all false, in USA you can't because only half are false
It is sad that the wisdom from behind the iron curtain (where I grew up, too) is so fitting in the US (where I now live) today. I find that critical assessment of the media, resistance to propaganda and brainwashing detection skills acquired over there served me very well in the US.
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
Ask anyone from China and they will tell you the exact same thing. They know their news is state sponsored and all propaganda. People in the united states are blissfully unaware.
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online
On the flip side, successful startups that aren't full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for example
I think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style "full-world" social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interest
And, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there's enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they're verified or not. You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users' subnetworks small enough that it isn't toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
I don't even think toxicity is a problem for users without public persona. Those that are public have to play by the same rules that were already in place for classical PR.
We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn't necessary.
You mention realistic forgeries, AI and huge volume as a possibility and that the outcome would be that people would be pushed into the real world but I'm not sure I see the connection.
If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.
At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
The lines between the online world and the "real" world are always blurry. You might not care on HN, but you probably will care when you're trying to meet someone on a dating website and waste a bunch of time chatting with someone only to realize that they're a very convincing bot and that you've spent X hours that you could've been using to meet real people.
It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
>At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
A relevant, if flip solution to the 'bot' issue[0].
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Any kind of widely used identity/authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation's products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.
For identity protocols I think BrightID (https://www.brightid.org/) is becoming more established and works pretty well.
See also Neal Stephenson's Fall: Dodge in Hell. What happens there though isn't authentic experiences but instead people buy tailored human/AI agent filters called editors to construct a reality for them by filtering out most media sources, including billboards and other interactive real-world advertisements and media screens. This way each individual has their own media reality.
> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?
Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.
I don't know if the news is really the best example of this today. Clearly there will always be a subjective bias in reporting the news, but as deep fakes become more prevalent it will become increasingly important to know that the origin of a video clip is trustworthy.
That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?
That's just digital certificate-based government ID. You could maybe provide some layer of abstraction above it to improve the developer experience, but at the end of the day you're reliant on it existing. Everything else will be too easily forged (unless you're planning on doing in-person validation).
>IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.
It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.
>Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
I think you have completely misread the situation. The "fakification" of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated "influencers" and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.
I agree that the system is already being heavily influenced by bots. I think that the public's perception of just by how much though does not match reality. As time goes on though, the lay public will come to the same realization that many of us have already arrived at: it's all fake.
I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.
> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Not so sure. I'd rather wage that people won't really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It's not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it's all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it's fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I'm not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.
Blue check accounts are expensive enough that, if you get the account banned, you can't easily make a new one. Bot accounts don't have this problem. If I want to trick as many people as possible into drinking bleach, I probably want easily-burnable bot accounts, so that when someone calls me out on it, I can just make a new one and pick up where I left off.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
China already has that. At age 16, all citizens must get an ID card. Photo and biometric info are recorded. To get a cell phone, the ID card is required, and as of last year, it's cross-checked by a face recognition scan. Cell phone IDs are tied to citizen IDs. WeChat accounts are verified against phone IDs.
Really? People censoring themselves is the problem?
Whenever I take a peek at social feeds I see people saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc.
Usually I end up the feeling that the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves, it usually even make them see extra things that normally they won't say.
Perhaps people censoring themselves is the reason you see crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc. The rational and well-mannered people aren't taking the risk so all you hear is those who will take the risk.
It's why politics is full of goons. Who in their right mind would go into that arena, to do good, when the risks are so high, the exposure so great, the hatred so guaranteed? Just the wrong people willing to take the risk.
At an IRL social gathering, when someone starts getting cranky, you see and/or hear everyone else in the room going clammy, and know they feel the same way as you do. There's a certain loudness to their silence.
On the Internet, those same people are completely imperceptible.
Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily. However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them. As such, what you are describing is actually evidence to support the self-censorship hypothesis, not refute it.
>Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily
Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse).
> However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them.
This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party).
To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
How many people do you see saying those crazy things? Hundreds? Thousands? What about the hundreds or millions or billions of others who don't post anything at all for fear (consciously or not) of backlash, either from the crazies or the not-crazies?
Obviously anecdotal, but I'm talkig about people I actually personally know.
IRL I'm able to have a conversation with them, online they are so used to trolls and extreme opinions that they get into "fight mode" where they automatically assume the worse about the other person, and interpret anything they say, in the worst possible way.
And I don't see any chilling effect, other than "fuck that, I'm not gonna follow Facebook/twitter anymore"
They're not writing anything, but they're not consuming it.
Now if so called journalists would stay off twitter/facebook, the problem will be solved. Because it's not a chilling effect if the entire aparatus is irrelevant.
You chose and interesting and very moderated forums there... Aren't the worst places on the internet unmoderated pseudonymous forums? 4chan, the horrible bits of Reddit, and the like?
The website doesn't only mention censoring but also conformity. If people are saying things that they wouldn't normally say but do because of the larger audience and concurrency of engagement then that contributes to the problem...
There are multiple issues. Self censorship is a problem, but conspiracy thinking is also a problem. Dr. Steven Novella recently said something to the effect of “the problem is that social media has automated conspiracy theory”. What he was talking about was how algorithms have had the effect of breadcrumbing people deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories and surrounding them with false confirmation.
Conspiracies come from low trust and a feeling of inferiority for different reasons. Problem is that some conspiracies are true and some are even pushed by authoritative news sources.
One conspiracy is certainly that the perspective of flat-earthers matters and should be addressed in any way. Same, with anti-vaxxers. We had vaccination quotas of 96% and as soon as people wanted to force others to vaccinate, it dropped considerably. Reactionary? Perhaps, but perfectly understandable.
There's a selection effect going on there. People with more circumspect attitudes are more likely to be sensitive to social cooling, and when they back off of social media, they take their more measured opinions with them.
The less certain people censor themselves. And the more other kinds of people censor themselves. There seems to be widespread colloquial agreement that those who don't censor themselves are usually more extreme in their views, more confident in their truthiness, and often more mistaken about basic verifiable facts.
This is very much a question of signal-to-noise ratio.
This is explained by Foucault: if you think that you are being watched, you will censor yourself. He uses the panopticon as metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon. Bauman later called our situation "Post-Panopticism".
> saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate
Sadly, I think this is par for the course, and often those "crazy" things are accepted by a large enough part of society that the cooling effect is very low.
Yes. For example, very few people in SV can openly say they are going to vote for Trump.
> the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves
Yes, people don't censor themselves when they are in majority. For example, those who live in SV, and support gay marriage and BLM, they can throw insults without repercussions.
I'd be interested in figuring out how I can use this to my advantage. For example, create a persona online that is optimal to lenders, employers and even the government.
The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.
What do you mean, "It's a fictitious company"? Is this not a legitmate service of yours? I get that the service, if real, produces fictitious content but your wording is throwing me off.
This reminds me of Gattaca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) where people with good genes rent out their DNA to those who have bad genes so they can get better jobs, insurance, etc...
It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell. For decades I've been open about my drug use, lack of care for people less fortunate than me, anti-organ-donation, anti-first-lady, illegal importation of pharma, and a hundred other things.
I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.
The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.
Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That's to be expected.
The way I see it is "Information wants to be free".
>It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell.
...It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren't affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.
Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to 'whoever has money' A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?
... These trends are worsening. People aren't spending more and more on data that has "no bearing on anything". That it's invisible to you makes it worse.
From what I understand this is an actual thriving industry already. Traditional identity theft (get someone's SSN and other info and open credit lines in their name) is much harder now, so the fraudsters have moved on to creating wholly made up "synthetic identities" de novo.
All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.
This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.
I don't think that would really fly. You may get served a higher class of ads, but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self.
Yes but that's just the thing: OP wants to create their "real" self, just not the authentic self. It becomes real, by association with the name of the person, yet it stays a simulated expression, a simulacrum[0].
Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.
Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.
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I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:
> but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self
Then doesn't this discount the threat being posed by the "Social Cooling" theory? If social media activity doesn't matter "when it comes down to real transactions" shouldn't we be less worried?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can't "social media fake" your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
This whole concept seems overdramatic to me at least at present. Banks are making lending decisions based on steady income and payment history, not your online persona. Similarly for employment. If you have reasonable qualifications, you will have no trouble finding work, regardless of how "optimal" your persona is.
Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
Of course not. You're free to suggest what you like. I'm not going to say something here and put thegrimmest into a list because I disagree with you and think you should pay extra for your flights.
/But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society.
I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
Society as a whole already normalizes this sort of thing. Many people will have to pay more for a house, and many more will simply be denied. When this paradigm is already so normal, people aren't going to be so averse to their digital and social habits being tracked and rewarded, ESPECIALLY if its advertised as a way to get discounts or benefits on certain services. Car insurance companies are trying it out as well.
The whole entire notion of a credit history, credit reporting agencies, and the idea of my personal information being out there and out of my control sounds so weird.
I think the thing that will cool off is the generation of outrage, and heated (note the term), emotional discourse.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
It seems like what you're describing as positive is only a small part of what the article is complaining about. How did you get from e.g. 'If you have "bad friends" on social media you might pay more for your loan' to the return of politeness to society?
I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.
You can only attack difference that is broadcasted. "Keep to yourself" is another way of phrasing it. This means don't go advertising and monpolizing the attention of others with your differences. Live your private live in private.
I do agree that it may foster politeness, but there are other undesirable effects of this cooling, such as political suppression. Sure, in a democracy like America, we love to tell everyone what we believe, and often it isn't polite, but in a place like China, it's beyond impolite to speak ill of the government, even when the criticism is just. I hate to invoke a slippery slope argument, but if we become timid around the subject of expressing our opinions, we may be easier to suppress. I would also like to add that there is an inherent value to speech. For example, a person who reveals government biases through photo or video is more valuable than a person who posts baseless conspiracies, hopefully we can have a proper value system socially enforced, rather than just have it all pushed down together
Ever heard “I don‘t mind if people are gay, I just don’t want to hear about it?”
Remember “Don’t ask don’t tell?”
The truth is that what is generally accepted today will be guaranteed to not be the same exact things that are generally accepted tomorrow.
Society moves from being more liberal back to more conservative through culture. Punishing people for straying outside lines when they are not causing specific harm to others eliminates the very method by which societies evolve.
What you are describing has lead to the stagnation and ultimately death of many cultures and societies.
> and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions
This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
I think the issue is that it is getting harder to have a private conversation or indulge in a private interest. It's quite difficult to have a conversation with a friend that's physically far away without using the services of one or more multinational corporations that may or may not be able to monitor what you say and sell that information to someone else. Of course it's possible, but how hard is it to analyze all the options and coordinate a method?
And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.
It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".
I don't find using WhatsApp or Signal groups to communicate with my distant friends particularly hard. These particular corporate platforms are quite ubiquitous. I'm also not particularly worried about being canceled for what I say in these conversations, since it's not something I've observed happening in wider society.
Contrast it to living in a small town. Everyone talks, including the local store owners. There's very little privacy in having a private interest or hobby.
Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.
It's not live and let live, it's live within the lines or be penalized. This isn't immediately terrible if you actually like living within those lines, but that's a big if. And what about when you or the lines change and they no longer align so well?
There's a big difference between politeness and total conformity to established (by the powerful) norms. Disagreeing (politely) with government policy on a public forum could easily prevent you from obtaining certain positions or status in the future if this is an accurate trend.
Not to mention that the freedom to go outside of convention without arbitrarily large punishment is worth preserving in of itself.
> Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
Is this what's happening? What I see is more and more people falling into a few different tribes, each attempting to out ostracize the other. Game theory suggests this will end with two main tribes with peak hatred for each other.
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend?
If it's a completely inaccurate trend, I suppose your suggestion then completely misses the hoop, so to speak. If anything, it seems like a lack of privacy has heated things up through the micro-marketing of a hundred types of off-kilter reasons to be angry to a hundred different slightly skewed personality types.
> I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions.
>If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.
When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.
It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.
In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.
That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.
Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.
And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."
One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."
Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.
When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.
But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.
Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.
I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.
This is a good site, but it leaves out the fact that the traditional mass media itself has enforced certain opinions, which subsequently leads to a chilling effect.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Complex topic, but I think a tagging and filtering approach is probably the best one. You can’t censor bad ideas without inviting total censorship, so instead just let people choose which things they want to hide.
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
You start by understanding hate speech isn't the issue. GPT-3 will happily barf out pages of hate speech for you, but that doesn't mean we're trying to ban/silence/cancel GPT-3, does it?
Sensible and jovial debate in the commons died when mankind died. We are pulling fairly hard into colouring people's reputation however we want via the internet with a humanistic culture.
Gotta be honest: I don't have to spend more than 5 minutes on Facebook to dissuade myself of the hypothesis that, on average, people are feeling constrained about what they're saying.
There are different social contexts. Everyone recognizes this; you'll say things around friends that you won't say in a work meeting.
Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.
A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
The algorithm is designed to provide maximally engaging content. Of your Facebook friends, you will see posts from the most outspoken ones, which isn't everybody.
but truly I bet you what you are referring to are people's opinions which are 'extreme' but at the same time probably can be lumped into groups of like-minded opinions with others - they are cooling towards their chosen echochambers but the same concept applies - because they get directed based on said data to these fringes because the data groups them towards them in suggestions
> If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.
I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago.
Edit:
I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
UMASS Amherst, an "experimental" elementary school for phycological observation. It's now no longer in operation, but for decades it was an elementary school with an upper "secret" corridor with two-way mirrors overlooking each classroom. The understanding between UMASS and Amherst was "We let you use the elementary school, we let our psych students take a look" type of thing.
Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again).
I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
>Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
There are a few identifiable elements of toxicity in social memia.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
No. The problem is that social media is like gathering all the people you know into a single room and shouting your thoughts at them. That's not how socializing is done. Not how the encouragement to seek out differing opinions in college works. Those things are done individually or in small groups. That works great, there can be a give and take where people can listen to each other. That's where social media badly breaks down.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
> My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you're gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.
While this is great advice, it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone.
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
Oh come on. When you meet your friends, you meet them in groups. When you talk to them, it's usually to sub groups or one to one. There's the nice colleagues from work, there's the childhood friends, there's the friends for drinking and banter and there's former girlfriends or love interests.
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive".
Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
Ginsburg and Scalia, even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship, had external considerations two average, everyday people wouldn't have. The image of the court, and its ability of folks with different world-views to come together and still respect each other when disagreeing-- it helps present an image of an impartial court. The functioning of SCOTUS depends on the legitimacy of its image. Many of our institutions function this way, but it is acutely important to the court.
> If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
The level of emotionally and politically motivated anti-intellectualism over the past decade or so has grown so much and so exponentially to the point that all-out idiocracy now rules the day. It's become a fashionable sport to compete on how aggressively one can deploy stupidity to drown out the voices of reason and truth, so that we all inevitably sink a little deeper into the worst instincts of human nature.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
I think you're making an assumption of participants that are reasonable, rational, and willing to engage in discussion and debate in good faith. But a lot of people are unreasonable, irrational, do not want to discuss, and are really simply entrenched in their belief systems and preaching it.
A lot of this is down to context, not our moral failings.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
I suppose your adult/child dichotomy is meant to be an insult and not taken literally, but I have to say that it's just as important for children/young people to intentionally seek out different opinions. Maybe even more so than adults, because that's when the bulk of your worldview, beliefs, and personality are formed.
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
You're painting a rosy picture. For example, how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis? If someone's opinions include the idea that I'm less than human, I can't be friends with them. It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game.
Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
Not only is the "climate change" analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
> Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website's claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of "social cooling" is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint.
The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
That's fair. I read the "Social Cooling" site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago:
I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.
I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
I've quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it's for good.
The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).
There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron".
There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.
Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.
Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.
Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven't seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.
Are you on Twitter? It's a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?
Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.
That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.
The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.
These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact/messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.
Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I'm connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger
I posted a "good-bye" message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.
You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don't download or log into the app
I've also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know.
Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.
In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ?
If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.
I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately.
social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.
I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I've realised the only reason I'm on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I'm a part of and those are only on FB. I don't connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.
There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn't require a facebook account. I don't use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!
I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB.
I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.
I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that's my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don't really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.
Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter.
FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.
These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.
That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.
The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.
White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
I remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
It is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
The idea has always been widespread but not accepted in the open. In the US the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy has lifted the fear of social recourse for supremacists (racists, sexists, fascists) and I suspect the same goes for other far right parties around the globe.
As far as I can tell the number of people who are part of the KKK hasn't gone up any appreciable amount.
In fact, calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" and then deplaforming "white supremacists" is an excellent example of this social cooling.
> White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
It's because this page is using "minority views" as a code word for "ruling class threatening views." Which has always been the case. A minority view that doesn't threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)
That one really rings false. Minority opinion holders are gathering online in record numbers. I'm thinking in particular of the nut jobs like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but also fan bases for obscure culture (reddit saved The Expanse) or the support for non mainstream political figures like Ron Paul or Andrew Yang. If anything, their ability to brigade online forums makes them seem far more prevalent than they really are.
Dare I say it, this same thing likely happens on this very website. People seek jobs directly off hacker news, so those people are likely to avoid saying anything that might alienate a potential employer.
How sure can you be that your alt isn't linked in some way (IP, browser fingerprint, text analysis, login/out timing patterns, etc.) to your main? Or, if not today, will internet archives be leveraged in 25+ years when big data can be more powerfully analyzed?
Wouldn't this only apply to employers that want your HN name ? And I've never seen a post that asks for that. Related however, is Blind. I think they do a good job setting up a pseudonymous community of like-minded individuals.
> "We're working on performance improvements that will hopefully allow us to go back to HN's original style of one big page per thread (not infinite scroll, don't worry). In the meantime please look for those 'More' links when the total number of comments is over 250 or so."
Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though.
Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder.
Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
Ironically, one of the things that's worst about being online is often the lack of social control. By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so without disapproving looks from people whose approval matters to them.
The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
> By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
I agree with the OP and you. They are not mutually exclusive views. Perhaps the solution is privacy that protects you for data aggregators and “joiners” that pull together a ton of stuff to infer things about you, but not necessarily completely shield your identity online.
Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
I'm going to ask a question that I fear will have me labelled as naively privileged almost beyond any hope of my eventually redemption.
Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes?
Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad?
Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
> Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric
Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up.
Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted).
As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method.
Comments on HN is an example of how this cooling effect works. It takes only a few upset readers to take your comment down, so if what you say deviates even slightly, by 0.01 sigma, from the boring mainstream viewpoint, you'll upset at least a few readers.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
If the Varian Rule is true, that what the rich have today, the middle classes will have in 5-10 years and the poor in 10-15, it's worth noting that what the rich have today is private security.
The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
The Secret Service has been protecting US Presidents for 100+ years. And bodyguards go back way further. Varian (via McAfee) was talking about technology. Let me propose a clarifying addendum:
"A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
I'd say that american software developers affording private security as a result of a company they founded is a pretty recent phenomenon. I'm sure there is an n<10 of early precedents, but the underlying point is that the response to these oppressive systems is likely to be uncivil.
Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.
This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines.
What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
Solutions? Just don't use the services? Check, I deleted facebook. Just talk to local people? I do, but it's hard. Especially now during COVID. Rely on encryption? Check, but still that does nothing to drive adoption directly. Still most apps require a phone number or email.
I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help.
Sure, now convince my 72 year old mother and the rest of my family to do the same. We understand the underlying problems of social media like Facebook and Twitter, but we are in a bubble. Most people outside tech don't have the same insight or understand the underlying issues to make the jump or even seek alternatives. Those who understand it somehow would simply stop using social media, but the large majority are either oblivious, don't understand the ramifications of lack of privacy in the Internet or don't care.
This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
I think parts of this message are very important, but the presentation makes it seem less interesting than it is. At first it looks to be just another "Social Dilemma" style "tech evil Zuckerberg bad" clone. Then it makes a connection to global warming, which, though it might be accurate, I think is an unfortunate link because that issue is more controversial than it should be.
The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public.
For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
Baudrillard uses the word "cooling" for this phenomenon circa 1980 and I'd expect it to be known throughout the fandom of French theory. See also "Cooling out the Mark" by Goffman and numerous thinkers that he inspired:
I'm sorry, but real people judging me is orders of magnitude worse than the Big Data thing they describe. They don't even provide any citations for the impact of Big Data they claim.
But they do. The social credit system in China is the perfect example. Makes it harder to operate in "real" space if you, for instance, have a "bad attitude". This is different than people just "not liking you", for the same reason. In that case, you still have total agency to start being a nicer person.
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
Agreed. This article didn't distinguish between "problems caused by Big Data" and "problems caused by your aunt on Facebook who would disown you if you post the wrong thing."
> Have you ever hesitated to click on a link because you thought your visit might be logged, and it could look bad?
Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list.
Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
Why wouldn't they be? Assange is an enemy of the state. Not "of the administration", but "the state", in total. The FBI is known to keep lists on and engage in attacks against what they perceive as enemies of the state. It's logical to assume that they might still do so.
They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
There are probably too many people commenting about Assange for them to do that, although ironically if enough people assume without evidence that they'll get swatted for talking about assange, then that will no longer be true.
Assange being an enemy of the state is sufficient proof for me that Trump is not as dangerous as the left says he is.
I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump's election.
Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.
> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.
> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.
I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.
Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?
For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.
What a weird premise...
Where exactly are these chilling effects? most social networks devolve quite rapidly to a slur party where people say stuff they would never say to actual people IRL.
I've stopped engaging in many places online over the last few years. The reason for me is that engaging with a pseudonym has become the exception rather than the rule.
The evolution of identity on the internet is an interesting one. In the 90s, using your real name was considered absurd. Now it's the standard. Maybe you'll also have a pseudonym in your handle, but the majority of people use their real name on most of their social media.
Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
I'm impressed with how well the authors were able to distill a complex concept into a catchy, memorable piece of visual communication. The privacy defenders have always had a messaging problem. It takes real chops to distill it down into something tangible for a layman.
Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
Agreed, I never read any of Bentham's work, but Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" was the first thing I thought of.
Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
> Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old.
To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
Great website, but I think the analogue to Oil and Global Warming is a bit clumsy...
Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth...
The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
Too much of anything is bad (in context). That is why too much input (ie taking everyone’s opinion) on a complex issue is just asking for paralysis by analysis. That is why there are multiple streams of higher learning and as a society the government employs the graduates of each stream as policy makers because they are supposed to be specialists in their field who can weigh in all pros and cons and understand the consequences to the extent possible , but better than the non specialists. This worked very well when information and opinions from everywhere and everything was not broadcasted at the speed that happens today. What I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that
b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc.
I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations.
I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like.
10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them.
Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around.
Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
Except text-only forums like HN I do not frequent any social media. I get very specific information out, if I want it but that's it. It amuses and scares me that literally billions of people spend hours every day with nothing but scrolling.
Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed.
If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
I was giving this some thought (I know, you smelled something burning -Tell your friends. Three shows a week).
They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap).
If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape.
That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work.
The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
Very good presentation, and very good analogies to get the general public attention.
I think the key points are:
- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.
- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.
I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
Maybe some more buy in could be achieved without the global warming fear mongering. Social media is directly impacting people's lives and there are real solutions individuals can employ to better themselves and their lives. It's time we stopped confusing pie in the sky boogie men with lack of personal responsibility and self awareness.
There is a solution to many of the issues highlighted in the article, and that is to drop judgementalism and bias altogether, as individuals and as society.
That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.
Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal.
I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
Social cooling is not global warming. Yes, they are both "subtle and complex," as are all modern issues. The latter poses an existential threat to humankind and has already claimed the lives of many. The other is certainly a problem, but to compare the two is not responsible.
The thing is we don't even need opaque algorithms to do that, we do it to ourselves. Not a week (I should probably even say not a day) without a "cancel campaign" on Twitter to go after some rando's job just because they didn't tweet The Right Thing.
Except most non tech people I know relish the attention, motivating them to go out more. "Do it for the 'gram". They're not wearing tinfoil hats, they want to see and be seen. Social cooling is not something I have observed in my circles.
> When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes.
This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
There were two kinds of participants in the mid-twenty-teens Internet explosion of over the top neo-Nazi, fascist, and reactionary ideology. (I heard it comically called the Internet "Heilstorm" or the "Basement Blitzkreig.")
The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology.
The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler.
The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive.
In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous.
At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this.
The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
This site seems oriented toward stimulating a response from one subpopulation but also seems to predict consequences based on that subpopulation being the population. Many people like to live "out loud", are proud of the lives they lead, and appreciate feeling "seen".
Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made?
Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
Some of these seem fairly reasonable. Is it not fair to pay a premium if you tend to return a lot of items. It costs the store more money? If you have friends with "bad" backgrounds there's clearly direct correlation between that and loan risk. Is this any different from how loan officers operated for all of history? Yes these create biases but are these biases justified?
With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
well said, but it s not a revelation. When social media started lots of people objected to the mindless sharing of everything for narcissistic reasons. The onion joked that facebook was a CIA project. Social media and China's social scoring system are very much related, elements of an unfree society in which average behavior is rewarded and weirdos, outcasts, misfits and rebels are "disappeared". Instagram feeds is pretty much like those soviet and north korean paintings in which everyone is smiling in front of fruit. Imagine if they had social media in the 60s, it would be an absolute shitshow.
If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!
Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
IMHO most of the article is based on bad attribution. Culture of conformity and risk-aversion is primarily an (intentional, not side) effect of social retribution / punishment and fear of it. Transparency / lack of privacy is just a factor that makes social retribution easier, not a primary cause.
As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
Before panicking here about your social score, can we actually do something about actual scores that impact your life nowadays? Like the credit score in the US? I think like people are barking at the wrong tree.
It's a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency. I'll be using term "social cooling" going forward, definitely.
Given the amount of stupidity and outrage flying around I don't think 'social cooling' il a phrase that has fear instilling potential. Social cooling sounds like something desirable nowadays.
People used to move from a small village to the big city for anomity and freedom. It would seem to me the loose inference to suggest who I am or what I do similar being mired by bad gossip from villagers.
100% agreed with this and trying a vastly different approach. Still early, but the idea is to merge people and topics while doing this through a question engine to invite everyone into the conversation... instead of just the loud & ego driven voices. Looking for beta testers right now, starting with NBA, NFL, Fantasy Football, & Tech for the early topic categories. If you're interested, let me know: https://trypersona.com
And this is why HN should remove the downvote! Seriously (here come the downvotes). If you're downvoting this you're doing exactly what this article is complaining about.
> People are changing their behavior to get better scores.
> Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
> It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company described itself as a "global election management agency".
I wonder if this might have a positive effect on extremists opinions/divisiveness in the US. Assuming "the problem" is that people are too divided in their political views, would social cooling bring people closer to the center by making people less likely to post "controversial" things, despite it being by hook and crook versus genuine unity?
Can those Credit Systems be it China’s or any social networking services be gamed? I’ve seen a lot of people deleting their accounts out of fear for their data and privacy. But at the same time, a lot people get the system to work in their favor, e.g r/churning. I’m not dismissing the harm or discouraging conversation for privacy. Just asking if we can hack it.
My "social cooling" hasn't come from big corporations harvesting my data (as far as I can tell, they're doing close to nothing with it that affects me directly).
My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.
15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.
Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.
But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
You self censor writing and opinions since you know you are being monitored. Thus you confer to the norm.
I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
While I really like the idea of presenting the subject of privacy and big data in a simple and intuitive way, and while I think that there is merit to the global warming metaphor, I'm worried that it might distract from the message.
Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
I am waiting my required 30 days to actually be allowed to delete facebook. Which is pretty crazy, that they won't even truly delete your stuff until then. Though I am sure, they are leaving all my eccentricities on many of their servers regardless of my insistence on deleting the account.
note that this is a landing page for marketing a (small) tech trends consultancy. it couches itself as counterintuitive new information on a hot-button topic that you can share with friends to be the in-the-know cool kid on the block for 10 minutes, to drive clicks, likely more as a branding and awareness campaign than a top-of-funnel source.
it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit).
as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
Am I the only one that thought this was an Apple ad? Apple execs are looking at the same problem and betting big that privacy must be deeply integrated into the brand. I think this will pay off enormously as these problems get more public discussion.
>LIKE OIL LEADS TO GLOBAL WARMING...
DATA LEADS TO SOCIAL COOLING
I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
There is a better, already-coined name for this: context collapse. Because everything is shared "globally" on social networks, we share less than in environments where we're with specific groups of people.
For anyone interested in a more philosophical look at how this affects people, Byung-Chul Han has some great writings about how modern technological society affects the individual in books such as The Burnout Society.
Okay, I don't really use social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tock, Snap Chat, or whatever else the kids these days are using. What happens with those jobs, loans, etc. if no data are available?
Cool story, but in my experience the problem is the opposite. Social media is full of people who feel free to say awful things and treat people poorly in ways that they'd never dare to in real life.
Some of the other comments address this. The problem is that we see and hear about these extreme viewpoints from people who are very loud and vocal. But we are not seeing or hearing anything from the vast majority of people which causes 2 problems
1. More and more of these platforms are driven by the extremists
2. There is less and less chance of actual debate and discussion with people of opposing views as anyone who you could have a discussion with is not engaging.
So, who has built a tool to help people build an ideal online persona, so that algorithms tell our employers, banks, insurances, etc.... that we are the perfect person they all want to deal with?
Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
I see a lot of pseudonyms here, but this is why everyone should revert back to, or start using, pseudonyms online, and take as many privacy-enhancing precautions as reasonably possible.
I started building Owl Mail [1] about 8 weeks ago to make it easy to create incognito address for your online accounts. It's become an essential part of my privacy toolbox.
this is particularly true for people who have international ties. you become subject to the social cooling mechanisms of very different cultures that may conflict with each other.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the irony that the ideology of the ‘radical’ punk scene is not too dissimilar to what is seen in corporate board rooms.
Funny anecdote: Foucault raised this issue because he didn't his intimate preferences to be made public. Now, on creating a whole theory on top of that...
If you hold right-of-centre views you definitely feel this already in all sorts of ways.
I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations.
You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list.
This website captures an element of that very well.
I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
You can go ask every individual company you interact with for what data they have about you. The details should be found in privacy polices.
Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
everyone interesting is always one terrifying git commit away from automatically marrying their public account and their alt-throwaway from a machine-learning de-anonymizer. the less you write, the safer you are.
Good point. Would switching the language help? E.g. if you learned Spanish (secretly!) and used it only for the purpose of writing, will a de-anonimizer still work (typos, punctuation should be easy to automatically take care of)?
I think they are referring to the idea of "apparatus" from Michel Foucault.
From wikipedia:
"I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."
I know what you're saying but you shouldn't just dismiss all of his thoughts. Yes, certain academics have abused, used, or selectively cherry picked pieces of this philosophy, in part, for turning academics into activism, but he'd probably turn in his grave regarding a lot of these developments. I mean he's against any sort of meta-narrative, for example.
I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages.
I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
So I like this, its interesting and useful framing.
My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here.
Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win".
Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views).
Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most).
This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
Instead of yapping about how you "deactivated your Facebook account"; maybe you should do some inner reflection on how your work directly contributes to potentially making the world a worse place to live.
I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech.
All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
Social media is fast food. Cheap, easy, filling, tasty and very, very, very unhealthy. Eating it once in a while is fine, but eat it every day and you'll get sick.
You /s but I've found that I can consume HN content with roughly equal level of unhealthy interest that I consume reddit content
That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
If hacker news was food, to me it would be a sandwich, something you can eat while relaxing, or in a hurry, not too flavorful, and not too nutritious, but certainly the lesser evil of food-media.
The content is brilliant. Very, very, very well done. From engineering POV: I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies, that no resource was blocked by uBlock / nanoDefender / nextdns. Amazing. Just amazing. Such a rarity nowadays.
So the website owners won't get proper analytics about who are their users, why they came to the website, how did they finish reading page to the end and so on. They won't know if their message was effective or not.
I'm the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That's all it has, and I'd argue it's enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling.
It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can't make a foolproof algorithm that'll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data.
There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/
And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.
I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
Sometimes I feel like VCs, investors and corporate employers have some kind of control panel where they can look up individuals.
It happened to me several times that I had great conversations with investors or prospective employers but then from one day to the next they appeared to back off for no particular reason. I hold very contrarian political views so I'm not sure if it has something to do with this.
What unfortunate, baseless fear mongering this is.
> “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy”
This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
I do not support anyone in the US, I don't even live in the US.
But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
I lived too long in a country where only one opinion is allowed, and those who speak differently get problems, like get fired. It is not that bad in the US (yet?), of course.
> > If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry
> But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. It means that when you start raving about the earth being flat or whatever, I can't shut you up. I can walk away, I can say "You're an idiot", and I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron", and then we can all say, "Hahaha! You're a moron! Neener neener" and so on and so forth. And you can do that to me.
I can even say "This guy is a flat Earther, don't buy his bread" and others can repeat it. That's freedom.
And if I do that I will, in practice, chill your speech because maybe you care about selling your bread more than you do about peddling flat Earthism. But that's what positive rights sometimes do.
And as someone with a strong view of individual freedom, I'd rather that chilling effect than any restriction on who I can speak out against.
Everyone has the freedom to bring mostly-negativity into the world, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them for it even when it's in support of issues I completely agree with.
Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.
I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.
I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.
If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?
All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.
That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done.
Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
Do you want to "speak consciously" on WeChat or risk facing the consequences of your "responsibility" in front a Chinese Communist Party court?
The very same tools that can enable your utopia can also very quickly turn into a dystopia. As you say, they are a powerful magnifier, transforming this world into a global village where every action has far-reaching unpredictable consequences. This means that we should be incredibly cautious when deploying these tools as they give great power to users and an even greater power to their makers.
Speaking consciously on WeChat means being conscious of all the consequences of your actions including with regard to your relationship as an individual to the state. I'm very happy to adopt that consciously, and have tried to be aware of these things and I have no problem with that at all.
Just like I'm not going to say something to hurt the feelings
of and make trouble for the family that's invited me to have dinner at their house, I'm not going to say things to hurt the feelings of a whole people, and double so when I'm a guest. And I'll try considering the unique culture of a place and how appropriate types of criticism, before opening my mouth. And triple so when I'm a guest with a megaphone.
Would you?
I consider doing it in a less considerate way is not very empathetic but also it's not good for me. It's self-destructive so I think people adopting this attitude under some misguided sort of heroic mythology are, stupid.
I'm okay speaking in more critical terms about countries where open criticism of their systems is culture. But even then there are lines. Assange, Snowden, went too far. To me, ignoring for a second the possibility they are limited hangout psyops, they are stupid men. Useful idiots, whose idealism, whether initially designed or not, had been co-opted by the states they posture at critiquing.
And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
But the unexpected benefit of this for me was I actually got a deeper understanding of different places unique ways and thinking, precisely because I deliberately withheld judgement and tried to look at things from multiple perspectives, not just from my inherited Western biases, which I consciously tried to be aware of and see more than.
So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
I don't think it's very empathetic for people to say, well Western culture do it this way therefore we should impose our cultural values on others.
But... these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks you have in Western countries basically equate to the social credit system in China, when you think about job opportunities, freedom of movement, access to capital, freedom from harassment and intimidation.
For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I don't understand what people find so difficult about the level of consideration that is just like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect, who am I to judge others? but I think in the West it harkens back to some sort of anti authoritarian distrust of the state.
Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
If you meant or were trying to confuse it deliberately with the survey tools then they are not what makes the world a village. They just enhance the watchers.
I agree we need to watch for dystopias and avoid them, but are you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
I think we need to watch, and learn from both places. Neither is a dystopia right now. But neither is perfect either. What's important is to learn, improve, and not think you've already achieved the pinnacle of civilization, nor take it for granted that you'll get there. You have to keep learning from what others are doing and inventing improvements. I just don't think framing the debate as privacy versus almost everything else is a very useful way forward.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one even though it's kind of hackneyed. The world really should get more open and connected and I think eventually the relationship between people and their states should become closer. In my intimate relationships I get privacy by what I choose not to disclose. In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. There's still a lot there... I think with the externalization of minds onto devices people are forgetting the power of their own brain and their own emotions.
What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things. But then again maybe I'm wrong and if I was in that situation I'd probably just make the best of it and think well what can I still enjoy and how can I adopt myself to fit in with where I'm at. But I think the reality is that when world Government comes it will be something that is tolerant of regional differences because that will be how a world government has to be introduced that's the only sort of way it's possible.
Regardless of the content I really don't like this website. I don't appreciate having to scroll so much and PgUp/PgDown don't move between the blocks smoothly.
sorry to say, but in this day and age with "cancel culture", "over sensitive millennials" and "non-binary morons" you have to restrict yourself or you get attacked and down voted or booted off (as my account now will). there is no such thing as free speech or expressing yourself, if you view doesn't fit the politically correct climate of the day. Just yesterday i had to tell someone not to gaslight another commenter because they felt the other commenter was offending OP. You can't even say "he/she" or "black/white" anymore without being sculled by someone since it might be insensitive. Honestly, this is the wonderful word we live in now and the author wants just to not be afraid to speak our minds and take risks???
I wonder how historically true it is that people had an ability to voice unpopular opinions without social consequence.
My parents are from the Soviet Union, so that example comes to mind most readily. Obviously speech was heavily restricted and policed in that time and place; a relative was briefly thrown in jail for handing out pro-democracy leaflets in the late 80s. My wife's family is from China, another country with a history of policing speech. There is a wonderful book called "The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" which talks about the negative consequences of seemingly innocuous speech during the Cultural Revolution.
Lest people think I only have examples from overseas, when I was growing up here, I found that criticizing religion, even lightly, was problematic. Organized religion was something of a sacred cow until perhaps the early 2000s. I have gay friends, and coming to their support in the late 90s and early 2000s was difficult, with the majority of opposition coming from the religious community.
After 2001, criticizing the war on terror lead many public figures to be deplatformed (or canceled in modern terms). An example of this is the MSNBC host Phil Donahue [1]. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "support the troops not the war" slogan to try to get around these issues, with mixed success.
Maybe folks who are older than me can compare the attitudes now with other historical periods, but I don’t believe it’s more difficult now to vocalize an unpopular opinion than it used to be.
I read history parts of civil rights movements in America. What I found was that any white who would support desegregation was ostracised and punished by whites.
Look, there has never been a part of history when you could be an unrestricted asshole and say whatever you want without consequences. Never. People have always been snowflakes. How about when people used to duel to the death over an insult? Your only solace is that before the internet and TV and mass communication, you could only be an asshole to your local community members.
Now, you have the power of being an unrestricted asshole to a larger audience than ever before. This, unsurprisingly, has even more consequences. In addition, this audience is more diverse than ever, with different opinions, backgrounds, upbringings, preferences, etc. Yes, just as always, there are people who are offended.
And just as always, you have to know your audience. Just like in the past, you wouldn't go to the local aristocrat and talk shit to them, you should know better than to go on Twitter and talk shit. Find your friend group, and say what you want with them. Like you always could. If you can't, find different friends.
People really underestimate how much power is given to them to have a near infinite audience on social media. But that power goes both ways.
i didn't say anything about being an "unrestricted asshole", racist, insulting or attacking anyone deliberately. i simply stated that if you're not in line with the PC terms dejour of the week, you run the risk of being ostracized. you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
Can't help but be reminded of Justine Sacco’s infamous tweet. The joke a frankly terrible attempt at irony, but my read was that she had intended to poke fun at racists. Sacco not only lost her job over it but had to endure weeks of death threats and threats of rape. People of course moved on but I do recall one journalist describing what he saw when he interviewed her for his book on public shaming. A sad shell of a human being with emotional scarring she'll have to endure for the rest of her life. Data is only one part of the problem.
It takes years and years of training in advanced dialectic bullshit to get to the point where you can say, with a straight face, that math is morally wrong. It's utterly absurd to demand that we censor models and worsen their output to conform to some activist's idealized imagine of how the world should be. Only by letting models report the true facts of the world as it is can we optimize for human happiness.
This article links at the bottom to similarly-styled piece about "mathwashing", the idea that it's morally wrong for an algorithm to notice true facts about reality. That idea is utter bunk, and so likely is "Social Cooling" as well. Both pushes are really about unelected activists trying to limit other people's technology to bring about their peculiar idea of Utopia.
In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
Men commit more violent offenses than women. Should I, a man, be turned down for a job because of this despite never having committed a violent offense? No woman has ever won the US presidency, should we therefore divert funds away from female candidates because they are provably less likely to win? If after doing that for a century and no woman has yet to win, should we still continue to divert funds away from them? I hope the answers to these questions are obviously "no, we shouldn't." If data-driven decisions are equally problematic but hide it behind layers of apparently justifiable (and often opaque) mathematics, then we have a problem.
the problem isn't necessarily with _accurate_ data and math, but with reductive statistics that paint with broad brushes. Statistics inherently remove nuance, which is fine when the nuance is unimportant to what you're measuring, but not when it's actually important.
The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.
Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
You missed the point. The point is that you can be doing the wrong math on the wrong data, jumping to completely baseless and detrimental conclusions. You cannot judge the needs of the many by the actions of the few or vice versa.
>In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated "social credit score". This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends.
This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust"
EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
It's extremely different. It's so so so so different.
The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).
It's a difference of degree and monopoly on violence.
... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.
I don't think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there's no incentive for them to do so.
It's the number associated with my bank account that dictates how much I can travel, where I can live, what kind of education I can get, and even whether I can eat. This is pervasive throughout modern civilization. China's social credit system is trivial in comparison.
It's a slower slide, but over time this information is centralised into a fewer and fewer large data brokers, what the scores means will become standardised across industries meaning eventually there will be no escape by going to competitors. This enables companies to start charging based on automatically generated risk profiles, some of which will end up being generated based on political preference (or proxies for it) Eventually this means that people with bad scores will be unable to afford certain things in the same way that they have trouble accessing credit. Credit scores are just the beginning.
For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, 'logically', you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.
This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it's not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.
This is also not new, this reminds me of the early days of eBay with user ratings impacting your ability to buy / sell goods (especially as a new account).
I think this is a good example of how pro-privacy arguments should be framed. It is takes the varied aspects and complex implications of tracking users across the web (or even in the real world), and distills it down into an easy to understand concept.
When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
Agreed. I think the audience matters too -- different messages appeal to different people.
My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they're doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn't always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it's too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else's. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn't mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.
I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there's no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he's sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He's not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn't want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That's when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.
> I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window.
I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.
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I went to a debate once, in which the former head of GCHQ (British equivalent of the NSA) argued that because agents weren't literally listening to people's phone calls, like the Stazi did, mass digital surveillance is fine. And unfortunately for many people this argument works. Human eavesdropping is obviously a problem at a viceral level, because somebody you don't know listening to you is frightening. The fact that digital surveillance gives power to its possessor just as much as human surveillance did is hard to get across.
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Privacy is simple. The "watcher" always without exception has a massive power imbalance in their favor. The first and often only line of defense against that power imbalance is the right to privacy.
Right. Apart from the sci-fi tropes, the extreme drama, and aesthetics, it's a spitting image. A great deal of effort is quietly spent on social control, keeping things as they are, and extracting value from people-as-cows, both here and there. Any technology in a position to add robustness to that system, to reduce its upkeep effort, or improve its efficiency at generating wealth for the privileged is likely to succeed, so it's reasonable to think some of the not-yet-here but possible aspects their world will make it to ours in time.
Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.
People-as-cows, huh? What does that mean to you?
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Yes, this was great. I think the slogans "Privacy is the right to be imperfect" and "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
> "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.
Seems to me that using word 'privacy' for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term 'privacy' for private interactions and use some other (like 'non-accountability') for public ones.
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Considering we're see "social heating" if not "social fire" all around us, I'm not sure this is informs people correctly.
My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where "BLM" is just earnest liberals as you'd expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren't all that bothered by the situation).
Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates "microchipping" people is a cartoonish example but there's a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don't have).
If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).
I believe that social cooling is a thing, and I also believe that the observations you're making are legitimate. Three points that might reconcile these ideas:
1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don't-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they've experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.
2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the "social fire" crowd - they don't understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don't think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.
3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to 'social fire'. People who don't have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone's decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.
this is the kind of privacy discourse I am interested in. Whether an individual can find my ssn, location, credit cards, or whatever personal information is not really what I am thinking about when I think about “protecting my privacy” but rather reducing my data emissions that compose these ratings. in my experience it’s hard to get this across to people who are not familiar though, always get the “I have nothing to hide :) what are you trying to hide?” response. Will try this “social cooling” framework next time. maybe a little less daunting as an entry point than “surveillance capitalism”
I never understood this. Economics 101 or 102 maybe tells us that our consumer welfare will be reduced if firms have less uncertainty about how much they can extract from us. You can make this argument more sophisticated in networks, regarding ads, regarding quality and what have you. But the basic case should be enough to convince you that amazon knowing every detail about you is not going to help you. At all.
So of course we have something to hide.
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It is enough in the present, but I'm not sure that will be enough in the future. People have always been distrustful of faraway strangers hiding their faces in hoodies and sunglasses. Similarly for a good credit score you need a history of taking and paying off loans.
You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.
> When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
We were 'almost' there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).
I was thinking more about the Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive'.
If there's anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it's that Deep-learning / AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc.
Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
I’ve heard this story too when growing up. I belong to one of the last generations born in the German Democratic Republic. A quite prominent element of our History and German lessons in the 2000s was critical reading of historic news and caricatures, we did these analyses in exams up to A-levels. Propaganda was a big topic, not only when learning about the Third Reich. One reason certainly was that all our teachers spent most of their lives in the GDR system.
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
I find this unpersuasive.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
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Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
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Remember me a joke, in USSR to know the truth you only need to put a NOT in front of an article of the Pravda, because are all false, in USA you can't because only half are false
It is sad that the wisdom from behind the iron curtain (where I grew up, too) is so fitting in the US (where I now live) today. I find that critical assessment of the media, resistance to propaganda and brainwashing detection skills acquired over there served me very well in the US.
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
> we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said
I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively
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Ask anyone from China and they will tell you the exact same thing. They know their news is state sponsored and all propaganda. People in the united states are blissfully unaware.
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Somehow what you were saying reminded me of reading The Onion.
You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name & occupation) each spouting something humorous?
and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.
Exactly, ask the same to anyone in Cuba or Venezuela.
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online
On the flip side, successful startups that aren't full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for example
I think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style "full-world" social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interest
And, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there's enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they're verified or not. You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users' subnetworks small enough that it isn't toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
> You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
In my opinion HN is the gold-standard of online communities and it's being managed pretty well despite it scaling to what it is right now.
I wonder more leanings from HN (specially on the moderation front) can be applied to newer social platforms.
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I don't even think toxicity is a problem for users without public persona. Those that are public have to play by the same rules that were already in place for classical PR.
We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn't necessary.
> But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
... Which is a good thing. (for the users, at least)
> do require some authenticity verification have already been proven
can add levels.fyi to that list as they now use actual offer letters to build their data set
You mention realistic forgeries, AI and huge volume as a possibility and that the outcome would be that people would be pushed into the real world but I'm not sure I see the connection.
If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.
At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
The lines between the online world and the "real" world are always blurry. You might not care on HN, but you probably will care when you're trying to meet someone on a dating website and waste a bunch of time chatting with someone only to realize that they're a very convincing bot and that you've spent X hours that you could've been using to meet real people.
It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
>At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
A relevant, if flip solution to the 'bot' issue[0].
[0]https://xkcd.com/810/
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Any kind of widely used identity/authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation's products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.
For identity protocols I think BrightID (https://www.brightid.org/) is becoming more established and works pretty well.
See also Neal Stephenson's Fall: Dodge in Hell. What happens there though isn't authentic experiences but instead people buy tailored human/AI agent filters called editors to construct a reality for them by filtering out most media sources, including billboards and other interactive real-world advertisements and media screens. This way each individual has their own media reality.
> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?
Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.
I don't know if the news is really the best example of this today. Clearly there will always be a subjective bias in reporting the news, but as deep fakes become more prevalent it will become increasingly important to know that the origin of a video clip is trustworthy.
That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?
That's just digital certificate-based government ID. You could maybe provide some layer of abstraction above it to improve the developer experience, but at the end of the day you're reliant on it existing. Everything else will be too easily forged (unless you're planning on doing in-person validation).
You'd have to do in-person validation.
But bots and spam and russian memes are already deeply engaging to people. I'm sure it will only get worse, though obviously some people will opt out.
>IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.
It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.
>Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
I think you have completely misread the situation. The "fakification" of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated "influencers" and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.
I agree that the system is already being heavily influenced by bots. I think that the public's perception of just by how much though does not match reality. As time goes on though, the lay public will come to the same realization that many of us have already arrived at: it's all fake.
I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.
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> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Not so sure. I'd rather wage that people won't really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It's not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it's all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it's fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I'm not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.
This is very interesting. So basically, we'll all use fake personas managed by AI. And nothing online will be real...
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Ironically accounts with Twitter's blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.
Blue check accounts are expensive enough that, if you get the account banned, you can't easily make a new one. Bot accounts don't have this problem. If I want to trick as many people as possible into drinking bleach, I probably want easily-burnable bot accounts, so that when someone calls me out on it, I can just make a new one and pick up where I left off.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
China already has that. At age 16, all citizens must get an ID card. Photo and biometric info are recorded. To get a cell phone, the ID card is required, and as of last year, it's cross-checked by a face recognition scan. Cell phone IDs are tied to citizen IDs. WeChat accounts are verified against phone IDs.
Now that's authenticity verification.
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Really? People censoring themselves is the problem? Whenever I take a peek at social feeds I see people saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc. Usually I end up the feeling that the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves, it usually even make them see extra things that normally they won't say.
Perhaps people censoring themselves is the reason you see crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc. The rational and well-mannered people aren't taking the risk so all you hear is those who will take the risk.
It's why politics is full of goons. Who in their right mind would go into that arena, to do good, when the risks are so high, the exposure so great, the hatred so guaranteed? Just the wrong people willing to take the risk.
At an IRL social gathering, when someone starts getting cranky, you see and/or hear everyone else in the room going clammy, and know they feel the same way as you do. There's a certain loudness to their silence.
On the Internet, those same people are completely imperceptible.
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Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily. However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them. As such, what you are describing is actually evidence to support the self-censorship hypothesis, not refute it.
>Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily
Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse).
> However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them.
This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party).
To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
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How many people do you see saying those crazy things? Hundreds? Thousands? What about the hundreds or millions or billions of others who don't post anything at all for fear (consciously or not) of backlash, either from the crazies or the not-crazies?
Obviously anecdotal, but I'm talkig about people I actually personally know. IRL I'm able to have a conversation with them, online they are so used to trolls and extreme opinions that they get into "fight mode" where they automatically assume the worse about the other person, and interpret anything they say, in the worst possible way.
And I don't see any chilling effect, other than "fuck that, I'm not gonna follow Facebook/twitter anymore"
They're not writing anything, but they're not consuming it. Now if so called journalists would stay off twitter/facebook, the problem will be solved. Because it's not a chilling effect if the entire aparatus is irrelevant.
Reasonable people on both sides censor themselves (at least more than unreasonable people).
My theory is that this is why Full Name Required comments fields and also Facebook is way uglier than pseudonymous forums like HN and Ars Technica.
You chose and interesting and very moderated forums there... Aren't the worst places on the internet unmoderated pseudonymous forums? 4chan, the horrible bits of Reddit, and the like?
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The website doesn't only mention censoring but also conformity. If people are saying things that they wouldn't normally say but do because of the larger audience and concurrency of engagement then that contributes to the problem...
There are multiple issues. Self censorship is a problem, but conspiracy thinking is also a problem. Dr. Steven Novella recently said something to the effect of “the problem is that social media has automated conspiracy theory”. What he was talking about was how algorithms have had the effect of breadcrumbing people deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories and surrounding them with false confirmation.
Conspiracies come from low trust and a feeling of inferiority for different reasons. Problem is that some conspiracies are true and some are even pushed by authoritative news sources.
One conspiracy is certainly that the perspective of flat-earthers matters and should be addressed in any way. Same, with anti-vaxxers. We had vaccination quotas of 96% and as soon as people wanted to force others to vaccinate, it dropped considerably. Reactionary? Perhaps, but perfectly understandable.
There's a selection effect going on there. People with more circumspect attitudes are more likely to be sensitive to social cooling, and when they back off of social media, they take their more measured opinions with them.
The hot get hotter, the cool get cooler. It's just one more way that people are pulling away from each other toward two opposite extremes.
Maybe the situation is like Idiocracy where a certain class of people are cooled but unreasonable, insensitive and hateful people do not.
Not all people are created equal...
The less certain people censor themselves. And the more other kinds of people censor themselves. There seems to be widespread colloquial agreement that those who don't censor themselves are usually more extreme in their views, more confident in their truthiness, and often more mistaken about basic verifiable facts.
This is very much a question of signal-to-noise ratio.
This is explained by Foucault: if you think that you are being watched, you will censor yourself. He uses the panopticon as metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon. Bauman later called our situation "Post-Panopticism".
> saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate
Sadly, I think this is par for the course, and often those "crazy" things are accepted by a large enough part of society that the cooling effect is very low.
> People censoring themselves is the problem?
Yes. For example, very few people in SV can openly say they are going to vote for Trump.
> the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves
Yes, people don't censor themselves when they are in majority. For example, those who live in SV, and support gay marriage and BLM, they can throw insults without repercussions.
If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry.
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what is SV?
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I'd be interested in figuring out how I can use this to my advantage. For example, create a persona online that is optimal to lenders, employers and even the government.
The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.
Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?
Creator of socialcooling.com here. You may enjoy this other website I created:
https://www.cloakingcompany.com
It's a fictitious company that helps you do exactly this. And while it's fiction, the tool actually does work.
What do you mean, "It's a fictitious company"? Is this not a legitmate service of yours? I get that the service, if real, produces fictitious content but your wording is throwing me off.
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I, for one, welcome our new culture jamming underlords.
testimonials for cloakingcompany.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24328764
Wow, I'm blown away. Thank you.
Honestly, this had even more impact on me than the social cooling site. Very nicely done.
You are brilliant! Is this opensource? Would love to contribute!
whoa, you should have led with that ;)
This reminds me of Gattaca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) where people with good genes rent out their DNA to those who have bad genes so they can get better jobs, insurance, etc...
DeGENErate
It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell. For decades I've been open about my drug use, lack of care for people less fortunate than me, anti-organ-donation, anti-first-lady, illegal importation of pharma, and a hundred other things.
I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.
The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.
Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That's to be expected.
The way I see it is "Information wants to be free".
>It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell.
...It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren't affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.
Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to 'whoever has money' A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?
... These trends are worsening. People aren't spending more and more on data that has "no bearing on anything". That it's invisible to you makes it worse.
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Was thinking the same. I wonder if there is a market selling "ready to move in" identities
Yeah, social media profiles are bought and sold like commodities daily. Look for "bots" in the news for examples.
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From what I understand this is an actual thriving industry already. Traditional identity theft (get someone's SSN and other info and open credit lines in their name) is much harder now, so the fraudsters have moved on to creating wholly made up "synthetic identities" de novo.
This is wire fraud, comrade.
All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.
This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.
Glory to Arstotska
I don't think that would really fly. You may get served a higher class of ads, but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self.
Yes but that's just the thing: OP wants to create their "real" self, just not the authentic self. It becomes real, by association with the name of the person, yet it stays a simulated expression, a simulacrum[0].
Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.
Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.
-----
I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:
See also Deleuzes "Societies of Control":
https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...
and:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844512_Societies...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
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> but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self
Then doesn't this discount the threat being posed by the "Social Cooling" theory? If social media activity doesn't matter "when it comes down to real transactions" shouldn't we be less worried?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can't "social media fake" your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
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This whole concept seems overdramatic to me at least at present. Banks are making lending decisions based on steady income and payment history, not your online persona. Similarly for employment. If you have reasonable qualifications, you will have no trouble finding work, regardless of how "optimal" your persona is.
Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
Hah. Reminds me of Gattaca.
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
Of course not. You're free to suggest what you like. I'm not going to say something here and put thegrimmest into a list because I disagree with you and think you should pay extra for your flights.
/But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society.
I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
Society as a whole already normalizes this sort of thing. Many people will have to pay more for a house, and many more will simply be denied. When this paradigm is already so normal, people aren't going to be so averse to their digital and social habits being tracked and rewarded, ESPECIALLY if its advertised as a way to get discounts or benefits on certain services. Car insurance companies are trying it out as well.
The whole entire notion of a credit history, credit reporting agencies, and the idea of my personal information being out there and out of my control sounds so weird.
I think the thing that will cool off is the generation of outrage, and heated (note the term), emotional discourse.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
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It seems like what you're describing as positive is only a small part of what the article is complaining about. How did you get from e.g. 'If you have "bad friends" on social media you might pay more for your loan' to the return of politeness to society?
I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.
You can only attack difference that is broadcasted. "Keep to yourself" is another way of phrasing it. This means don't go advertising and monpolizing the attention of others with your differences. Live your private live in private.
I do agree that it may foster politeness, but there are other undesirable effects of this cooling, such as political suppression. Sure, in a democracy like America, we love to tell everyone what we believe, and often it isn't polite, but in a place like China, it's beyond impolite to speak ill of the government, even when the criticism is just. I hate to invoke a slippery slope argument, but if we become timid around the subject of expressing our opinions, we may be easier to suppress. I would also like to add that there is an inherent value to speech. For example, a person who reveals government biases through photo or video is more valuable than a person who posts baseless conspiracies, hopefully we can have a proper value system socially enforced, rather than just have it all pushed down together
Ever heard “I don‘t mind if people are gay, I just don’t want to hear about it?”
Remember “Don’t ask don’t tell?”
The truth is that what is generally accepted today will be guaranteed to not be the same exact things that are generally accepted tomorrow.
Society moves from being more liberal back to more conservative through culture. Punishing people for straying outside lines when they are not causing specific harm to others eliminates the very method by which societies evolve.
What you are describing has lead to the stagnation and ultimately death of many cultures and societies.
> and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions
This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
I think the issue is that it is getting harder to have a private conversation or indulge in a private interest. It's quite difficult to have a conversation with a friend that's physically far away without using the services of one or more multinational corporations that may or may not be able to monitor what you say and sell that information to someone else. Of course it's possible, but how hard is it to analyze all the options and coordinate a method?
And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.
It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".
I don't find using WhatsApp or Signal groups to communicate with my distant friends particularly hard. These particular corporate platforms are quite ubiquitous. I'm also not particularly worried about being canceled for what I say in these conversations, since it's not something I've observed happening in wider society.
Contrast it to living in a small town. Everyone talks, including the local store owners. There's very little privacy in having a private interest or hobby.
Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.
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Ah, my friends, time to return to snail mail and security envelopes!
It's not live and let live, it's live within the lines or be penalized. This isn't immediately terrible if you actually like living within those lines, but that's a big if. And what about when you or the lines change and they no longer align so well?
There's a big difference between politeness and total conformity to established (by the powerful) norms. Disagreeing (politely) with government policy on a public forum could easily prevent you from obtaining certain positions or status in the future if this is an accurate trend.
Not to mention that the freedom to go outside of convention without arbitrarily large punishment is worth preserving in of itself.
Trend? Here's Orwell (1948) on the financial side of heterodoxy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23822425
"Freakin' internet. Whats up with that?" — M.I.A.
> Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
Is this what's happening? What I see is more and more people falling into a few different tribes, each attempting to out ostracize the other. Game theory suggests this will end with two main tribes with peak hatred for each other.
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend?
If it's a completely inaccurate trend, I suppose your suggestion then completely misses the hoop, so to speak. If anything, it seems like a lack of privacy has heated things up through the micro-marketing of a hundred types of off-kilter reasons to be angry to a hundred different slightly skewed personality types.
> I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions.
I see you've never been to the internet.
>If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.
When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.
It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.
In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.
That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.
Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.
And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."
One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."
Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.
When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.
But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.
Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.
I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.
The idea has only accidental correlation with social media. You are pretty much wrong focusing your thinking on social media only.
This is a good site, but it leaves out the fact that the traditional mass media itself has enforced certain opinions, which subsequently leads to a chilling effect.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle (paraphrased)
That's a lofty idea, but how do you deal with hate speech ?
Complex topic, but I think a tagging and filtering approach is probably the best one. You can’t censor bad ideas without inviting total censorship, so instead just let people choose which things they want to hide.
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
You start by understanding hate speech isn't the issue. GPT-3 will happily barf out pages of hate speech for you, but that doesn't mean we're trying to ban/silence/cancel GPT-3, does it?
You could start with realizing that the problem is not the speech part.
Sensible and jovial debate in the commons died when mankind died. We are pulling fairly hard into colouring people's reputation however we want via the internet with a humanistic culture.
Gotta be honest: I don't have to spend more than 5 minutes on Facebook to dissuade myself of the hypothesis that, on average, people are feeling constrained about what they're saying.
Pretty good example of selection bias. The people who are concerned are not going to be posting on facebook.
That also exacerbates the problem. The only people posting are strongly opinionated loud mouths.
Then we would expect posting on Facebook to go down, yet Facebook's user count keeps going up.
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While true, there's not a good way to prove why others aren't posting; maybe it's "social cooling" or maybe they just got bored.
There are different social contexts. Everyone recognizes this; you'll say things around friends that you won't say in a work meeting.
Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.
A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
The algorithm is designed to provide maximally engaging content. Of your Facebook friends, you will see posts from the most outspoken ones, which isn't everybody.
but truly I bet you what you are referring to are people's opinions which are 'extreme' but at the same time probably can be lumped into groups of like-minded opinions with others - they are cooling towards their chosen echochambers but the same concept applies - because they get directed based on said data to these fringes because the data groups them towards them in suggestions
I find myself holding back upvoting posts on HN as analysis of my voting habits would give such a clear indication of my inner thoughts.
> If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.
I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago.
Edit: I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
What kind of schools do that? I'm not familiar with this at all, man I'd feel weird being in a classroom with a huge mirror.
UMASS Amherst, an "experimental" elementary school for phycological observation. It's now no longer in operation, but for decades it was an elementary school with an upper "secret" corridor with two-way mirrors overlooking each classroom. The understanding between UMASS and Amherst was "We let you use the elementary school, we let our psych students take a look" type of thing.
Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
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This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again).
I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
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> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
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>Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
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There are a few identifiable elements of toxicity in social memia.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
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No. The problem is that social media is like gathering all the people you know into a single room and shouting your thoughts at them. That's not how socializing is done. Not how the encouragement to seek out differing opinions in college works. Those things are done individually or in small groups. That works great, there can be a give and take where people can listen to each other. That's where social media badly breaks down.
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
> My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
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If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you're gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.
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While this is great advice, it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone.
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
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Oh come on. When you meet your friends, you meet them in groups. When you talk to them, it's usually to sub groups or one to one. There's the nice colleagues from work, there's the childhood friends, there's the friends for drinking and banter and there's former girlfriends or love interests.
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
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This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive". Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
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Ginsburg and Scalia, even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship, had external considerations two average, everyday people wouldn't have. The image of the court, and its ability of folks with different world-views to come together and still respect each other when disagreeing-- it helps present an image of an impartial court. The functioning of SCOTUS depends on the legitimacy of its image. Many of our institutions function this way, but it is acutely important to the court.
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> If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
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> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
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> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
The level of emotionally and politically motivated anti-intellectualism over the past decade or so has grown so much and so exponentially to the point that all-out idiocracy now rules the day. It's become a fashionable sport to compete on how aggressively one can deploy stupidity to drown out the voices of reason and truth, so that we all inevitably sink a little deeper into the worst instincts of human nature.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
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I think you're making an assumption of participants that are reasonable, rational, and willing to engage in discussion and debate in good faith. But a lot of people are unreasonable, irrational, do not want to discuss, and are really simply entrenched in their belief systems and preaching it.
A lot of this is down to context, not our moral failings.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
I suppose your adult/child dichotomy is meant to be an insult and not taken literally, but I have to say that it's just as important for children/young people to intentionally seek out different opinions. Maybe even more so than adults, because that's when the bulk of your worldview, beliefs, and personality are formed.
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
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All people deserve respect. Not all opinions do.
You're painting a rosy picture. For example, how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis? If someone's opinions include the idea that I'm less than human, I can't be friends with them. It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
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Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game.
Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
Not only is the "climate change" analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
> Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
Wait, is email really dead?
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I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website's claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of "social cooling" is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint.
The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
That's fair. I read the "Social Cooling" site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precar...
I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.
I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
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I've quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it's for good.
The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).
There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron".
https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom...
There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
> I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd.
This is called "context collapse"
https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse
You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.
> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.
Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they're posting that offend people all the time. That's quite an achievement.
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Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.
Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(
Facebook had lists introduced after Google+ circles.
It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list.
I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful.
Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser.
They should bring them back.
Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.
Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven't seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.
Are you on Twitter? It's a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?
It's funny, one of my friends posted on his FB, "Who are you voting for and why?" And nobody took the bait. He just got a bunch of popcorn eating gifs
Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.
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That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.
Yeah that was sad.
The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.
These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
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As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact/messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.
Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I'm connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger
yes, you can deactivate your facebook account and still use messenger, see https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1526848634305688
I posted a "good-bye" message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.
You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don't download or log into the app
I've also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know.
Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.
In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ?
If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.
I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately.
social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098
I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I've realised the only reason I'm on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I'm a part of and those are only on FB. I don't connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.
There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn't require a facebook account. I don't use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!
I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB.
I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.
I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
When 'friends' post on Facebook, they are putting their message on my feed. That's fine, that's the implicit agreement.
Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post.
That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.
Yeah and by handcrafting those subsets you'd give LOTS of valuable info to their algorithms.
All I use FB for these days is to look in on specific friends, by name. I never view the feed.
Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.
But at least you can watch autoplaying videos of people getting shot
Killer feature
I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.
I’m really curious about the things you were saying that were making people mad.
I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that's my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don't really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.
Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter.
FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.
These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.
https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434
> that's my only way to keep in touch with them
That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.
https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.
White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
I remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
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It's gained a lot of attention. Is there any real evidence that it's gained traction?
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Calling people you disagree with "white supremacists" has certainly gained ground.
But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.
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It is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.
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> White supremacy is a minority view
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
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The key thing here is white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US
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The idea has always been widespread but not accepted in the open. In the US the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy has lifted the fear of social recourse for supremacists (racists, sexists, fascists) and I suspect the same goes for other far right parties around the globe.
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> White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction
Well obviously, the definition expanded:
https://i.imgur.com/gW9sQoM.jpg
As far as I can tell the number of people who are part of the KKK hasn't gone up any appreciable amount.
In fact, calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" and then deplaforming "white supremacists" is an excellent example of this social cooling.
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> White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
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It's because this page is using "minority views" as a code word for "ruling class threatening views." Which has always been the case. A minority view that doesn't threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)
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That one really rings false. Minority opinion holders are gathering online in record numbers. I'm thinking in particular of the nut jobs like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but also fan bases for obscure culture (reddit saved The Expanse) or the support for non mainstream political figures like Ron Paul or Andrew Yang. If anything, their ability to brigade online forums makes them seem far more prevalent than they really are.
The people who effected that progress often did so under constant, actual physical attack and various forms of blacklisting.
Dare I say it, this same thing likely happens on this very website. People seek jobs directly off hacker news, so those people are likely to avoid saying anything that might alienate a potential employer.
It's easier to just use an alt.
How sure can you be that your alt isn't linked in some way (IP, browser fingerprint, text analysis, login/out timing patterns, etc.) to your main? Or, if not today, will internet archives be leveraged in 25+ years when big data can be more powerfully analyzed?
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How is it easier to use an alt versus simply not saying it at all?
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My first interview I got through HN, they asked me what my HN username was. They ended up saying “you have more karma than me” and that was it.
Wouldn't this only apply to employers that want your HN name ? And I've never seen a post that asks for that. Related however, is Blind. I think they do a good job setting up a pseudonymous community of like-minded individuals.
There’s a monthly ‘who wants to get hired’ thread, where potential employers answer to chosen posts, knowing the candidate’s HN account.
(2017)
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=socialcooling
Hey dang, I've seen you make these "multiple pages" comments a few times now. Maybe it is just time for a UI that fixes that?
> "We're working on performance improvements that will hopefully allow us to go back to HN's original style of one big page per thread (not infinite scroll, don't worry). In the meantime please look for those 'More' links when the total number of comments is over 250 or so."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851745
I was about to say exactly the same thing.
Knowing how HN handles UX, maybe's dang's (automated?) comments at the top _is_ the UI.
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This is why Real Names is such an evil idea.
Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though.
Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder.
Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
Ironically, one of the things that's worst about being online is often the lack of social control. By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so without disapproving looks from people whose approval matters to them.
The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
> By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
I agree with the OP and you. They are not mutually exclusive views. Perhaps the solution is privacy that protects you for data aggregators and “joiners” that pull together a ton of stuff to infer things about you, but not necessarily completely shield your identity online.
Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
This is an episode of Black Mirror, coming to our reality sooner than thought.
Netflix Trailer https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
It's already happening in China with the Social Credit System.
I'm going to ask a question that I fear will have me labelled as naively privileged almost beyond any hope of my eventually redemption.
Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes?
Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad?
Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
> Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric
Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up.
Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted).
As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method.
Break the frame, you will see a lot more options.
wat?
put down the thesaurus and use real words
Comments on HN is an example of how this cooling effect works. It takes only a few upset readers to take your comment down, so if what you say deviates even slightly, by 0.01 sigma, from the boring mainstream viewpoint, you'll upset at least a few readers.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
If the Varian Rule is true, that what the rich have today, the middle classes will have in 5-10 years and the poor in 10-15, it's worth noting that what the rich have today is private security.
The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
The Secret Service has been protecting US Presidents for 100+ years. And bodyguards go back way further. Varian (via McAfee) was talking about technology. Let me propose a clarifying addendum:
"A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
I'd say that american software developers affording private security as a result of a company they founded is a pretty recent phenomenon. I'm sure there is an n<10 of early precedents, but the underlying point is that the response to these oppressive systems is likely to be uncivil.
Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
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Probably also worth noting how the rich today do not use social media the way the middle classes use it.
I like the climate change comparison.
One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.
This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines.
What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
Solutions? Just don't use the services? Check, I deleted facebook. Just talk to local people? I do, but it's hard. Especially now during COVID. Rely on encryption? Check, but still that does nothing to drive adoption directly. Still most apps require a phone number or email.
I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help.
Perhaps I'll start going to church, god help me.
Use freedom-respecting non-profit social networks instead: https://joinmastodon.org.
Sure, now convince my 72 year old mother and the rest of my family to do the same. We understand the underlying problems of social media like Facebook and Twitter, but we are in a bubble. Most people outside tech don't have the same insight or understand the underlying issues to make the jump or even seek alternatives. Those who understand it somehow would simply stop using social media, but the large majority are either oblivious, don't understand the ramifications of lack of privacy in the Internet or don't care.
This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
I think parts of this message are very important, but the presentation makes it seem less interesting than it is. At first it looks to be just another "Social Dilemma" style "tech evil Zuckerberg bad" clone. Then it makes a connection to global warming, which, though it might be accurate, I think is an unfortunate link because that issue is more controversial than it should be.
The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public.
For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
Baudrillard uses the word "cooling" for this phenomenon circa 1980 and I'd expect it to be known throughout the fandom of French theory. See also "Cooling out the Mark" by Goffman and numerous thinkers that he inspired:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_out
St. Benedict's latin term for coolers is senpectae (516).
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
I'm sorry, but real people judging me is orders of magnitude worse than the Big Data thing they describe. They don't even provide any citations for the impact of Big Data they claim.
But they do. The social credit system in China is the perfect example. Makes it harder to operate in "real" space if you, for instance, have a "bad attitude". This is different than people just "not liking you", for the same reason. In that case, you still have total agency to start being a nicer person.
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
I don't say that there is no danger, just that at the current time (in the West), actual humans monitoring you is a much bigger issue.
Agreed. This article didn't distinguish between "problems caused by Big Data" and "problems caused by your aunt on Facebook who would disown you if you post the wrong thing."
> Have you ever hesitated to click on a link because you thought your visit might be logged, and it could look bad?
Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list.
Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
If curious see also the previous big thread (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882
Just the other day I asked people on here if they are afraid of commenting on Assange on HN incase the FBI break down their doors.
to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?
Why wouldn't they be? Assange is an enemy of the state. Not "of the administration", but "the state", in total. The FBI is known to keep lists on and engage in attacks against what they perceive as enemies of the state. It's logical to assume that they might still do so.
They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
There are probably too many people commenting about Assange for them to do that, although ironically if enough people assume without evidence that they'll get swatted for talking about assange, then that will no longer be true.
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Assange being an enemy of the state is sufficient proof for me that Trump is not as dangerous as the left says he is.
I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump's election.
Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wikileaks-julian-assange...
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> https://www.mathwashing.com/
> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.
> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.
I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.
Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?
For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.
What a weird premise... Where exactly are these chilling effects? most social networks devolve quite rapidly to a slur party where people say stuff they would never say to actual people IRL.
I've stopped engaging in many places online over the last few years. The reason for me is that engaging with a pseudonym has become the exception rather than the rule.
The evolution of identity on the internet is an interesting one. In the 90s, using your real name was considered absurd. Now it's the standard. Maybe you'll also have a pseudonym in your handle, but the majority of people use their real name on most of their social media.
Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
I'm impressed with how well the authors were able to distill a complex concept into a catchy, memorable piece of visual communication. The privacy defenders have always had a messaging problem. It takes real chops to distill it down into something tangible for a layman.
Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
Agreed, I never read any of Bentham's work, but Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" was the first thing I thought of.
Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
> Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old.
To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
Great website, but I think the analogue to Oil and Global Warming is a bit clumsy...
Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth...
The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
Too much of anything is bad (in context). That is why too much input (ie taking everyone’s opinion) on a complex issue is just asking for paralysis by analysis. That is why there are multiple streams of higher learning and as a society the government employs the graduates of each stream as policy makers because they are supposed to be specialists in their field who can weigh in all pros and cons and understand the consequences to the extent possible , but better than the non specialists. This worked very well when information and opinions from everywhere and everything was not broadcasted at the speed that happens today. What I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
It feels like there is a contradiction.
a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc.
I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations.
I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like.
10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them.
Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around.
Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
Except text-only forums like HN I do not frequent any social media. I get very specific information out, if I want it but that's it. It amuses and scares me that literally billions of people spend hours every day with nothing but scrolling.
Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed.
If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
I was giving this some thought (I know, you smelled something burning -Tell your friends. Three shows a week).
They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap).
If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape.
That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work.
The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
Before beats: bohemians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
Very good presentation, and very good analogies to get the general public attention.
I think the key points are:
- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.
- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.
I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
Maybe some more buy in could be achieved without the global warming fear mongering. Social media is directly impacting people's lives and there are real solutions individuals can employ to better themselves and their lives. It's time we stopped confusing pie in the sky boogie men with lack of personal responsibility and self awareness.
How would more personal responsibility and self-awareness help Chinese dissidents, in your opinion?
What do you mean "without the global warming fear mongering"?
There is a solution to many of the issues highlighted in the article, and that is to drop judgementalism and bias altogether, as individuals and as society.
That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.
Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal.
I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
Social cooling is not global warming. Yes, they are both "subtle and complex," as are all modern issues. The latter poses an existential threat to humankind and has already claimed the lives of many. The other is certainly a problem, but to compare the two is not responsible.
The thing is we don't even need opaque algorithms to do that, we do it to ourselves. Not a week (I should probably even say not a day) without a "cancel campaign" on Twitter to go after some rando's job just because they didn't tweet The Right Thing.
Except most non tech people I know relish the attention, motivating them to go out more. "Do it for the 'gram". They're not wearing tinfoil hats, they want to see and be seen. Social cooling is not something I have observed in my circles.
> When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes.
This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
I was thinking of Goodhart's law too when reading that part of the presentation.
There were two kinds of participants in the mid-twenty-teens Internet explosion of over the top neo-Nazi, fascist, and reactionary ideology. (I heard it comically called the Internet "Heilstorm" or the "Basement Blitzkreig.")
The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology.
The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler.
The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive.
In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous.
At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this.
The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
This site seems oriented toward stimulating a response from one subpopulation but also seems to predict consequences based on that subpopulation being the population. Many people like to live "out loud", are proud of the lives they lead, and appreciate feeling "seen".
Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made?
Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
Some of these seem fairly reasonable. Is it not fair to pay a premium if you tend to return a lot of items. It costs the store more money? If you have friends with "bad" backgrounds there's clearly direct correlation between that and loan risk. Is this any different from how loan officers operated for all of history? Yes these create biases but are these biases justified?
With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
well said, but it s not a revelation. When social media started lots of people objected to the mindless sharing of everything for narcissistic reasons. The onion joked that facebook was a CIA project. Social media and China's social scoring system are very much related, elements of an unfree society in which average behavior is rewarded and weirdos, outcasts, misfits and rebels are "disappeared". Instagram feeds is pretty much like those soviet and north korean paintings in which everyone is smiling in front of fruit. Imagine if they had social media in the 60s, it would be an absolute shitshow.
There's a contemporary russian illustrator who specialises in Ostalgia, as if the soviets had had pinups and Norman Rockwell.
Young Pioneer examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440206
I censor myself on Wechat.
am American.
If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!
Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
IMHO most of the article is based on bad attribution. Culture of conformity and risk-aversion is primarily an (intentional, not side) effect of social retribution / punishment and fear of it. Transparency / lack of privacy is just a factor that makes social retribution easier, not a primary cause.
As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
Before panicking here about your social score, can we actually do something about actual scores that impact your life nowadays? Like the credit score in the US? I think like people are barking at the wrong tree.
It's a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency. I'll be using term "social cooling" going forward, definitely.
Given the amount of stupidity and outrage flying around I don't think 'social cooling' il a phrase that has fear instilling potential. Social cooling sounds like something desirable nowadays.
People used to move from a small village to the big city for anomity and freedom. It would seem to me the loose inference to suggest who I am or what I do similar being mired by bad gossip from villagers.
100% agreed with this and trying a vastly different approach. Still early, but the idea is to merge people and topics while doing this through a question engine to invite everyone into the conversation... instead of just the loud & ego driven voices. Looking for beta testers right now, starting with NBA, NFL, Fantasy Football, & Tech for the early topic categories. If you're interested, let me know: https://trypersona.com
And this is why HN should remove the downvote! Seriously (here come the downvotes). If you're downvoting this you're doing exactly what this article is complaining about.
> People are changing their behavior to get better scores.
> Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
Down-votes should mean "this comment doesn't contribute in good faith," or "this is a distraction".
How something could be well utilized, versus how it is utilized, may be two different things.
According to Dang, downvotes on HN are for disagreeing with ideas and opinions.
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> It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company described itself as a "global election management agency".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
Wow.
I wonder if this might have a positive effect on extremists opinions/divisiveness in the US. Assuming "the problem" is that people are too divided in their political views, would social cooling bring people closer to the center by making people less likely to post "controversial" things, despite it being by hook and crook versus genuine unity?
Can those Credit Systems be it China’s or any social networking services be gamed? I’ve seen a lot of people deleting their accounts out of fear for their data and privacy. But at the same time, a lot people get the system to work in their favor, e.g r/churning. I’m not dismissing the harm or discouraging conversation for privacy. Just asking if we can hack it.
My "social cooling" hasn't come from big corporations harvesting my data (as far as I can tell, they're doing close to nothing with it that affects me directly).
My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.
15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.
Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.
But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
You self censor writing and opinions since you know you are being monitored. Thus you confer to the norm.
I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
Grow up and delete social media attached to your identity. The people who actually care about you will still contact you.
While I really like the idea of presenting the subject of privacy and big data in a simple and intuitive way, and while I think that there is merit to the global warming metaphor, I'm worried that it might distract from the message.
Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
I am waiting my required 30 days to actually be allowed to delete facebook. Which is pretty crazy, that they won't even truly delete your stuff until then. Though I am sure, they are leaving all my eccentricities on many of their servers regardless of my insistence on deleting the account.
Oh hey that's why I have the username I have.
I'm nearing 1k karma I'll likely cycle this account soon.
I like your idea on not just having an alt but actively cycling through new ones once they've been in use for a while.
Any other steps you've taken ?
Nope just
for username and password. Shove into password manager.
I rotate the usernames because you are constantly leaking information, whether it's interests you express, patterns of speech etc.
note that this is a landing page for marketing a (small) tech trends consultancy. it couches itself as counterintuitive new information on a hot-button topic that you can share with friends to be the in-the-know cool kid on the block for 10 minutes, to drive clicks, likely more as a branding and awareness campaign than a top-of-funnel source.
it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit).
as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
This is the Hawthorne effect - a cousin of the placebo effect. It's a v useful idea.
Per the Hawthorne effect, you modify your behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed.
(The placebo effect describes an change based on an inert intervention regardless of observation.)
Am I the only one that thought this was an Apple ad? Apple execs are looking at the same problem and betting big that privacy must be deeply integrated into the brand. I think this will pay off enormously as these problems get more public discussion.
>LIKE OIL LEADS TO GLOBAL WARMING... DATA LEADS TO SOCIAL COOLING
I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
There is a better, already-coined name for this: context collapse. Because everything is shared "globally" on social networks, we share less than in environments where we're with specific groups of people.
For anyone interested in a more philosophical look at how this affects people, Byung-Chul Han has some great writings about how modern technological society affects the individual in books such as The Burnout Society.
Okay, I don't really use social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tock, Snap Chat, or whatever else the kids these days are using. What happens with those jobs, loans, etc. if no data are available?
Cool story, but in my experience the problem is the opposite. Social media is full of people who feel free to say awful things and treat people poorly in ways that they'd never dare to in real life.
Social cooling? Does anyone actually think that the problem in our society right now is social cooling?
It seems like very much the opposite to me. There is no chilling effect. It's exactly the reverse.
Some of the other comments address this. The problem is that we see and hear about these extreme viewpoints from people who are very loud and vocal. But we are not seeing or hearing anything from the vast majority of people which causes 2 problems 1. More and more of these platforms are driven by the extremists 2. There is less and less chance of actual debate and discussion with people of opposing views as anyone who you could have a discussion with is not engaging.
So, who has built a tool to help people build an ideal online persona, so that algorithms tell our employers, banks, insurances, etc.... that we are the perfect person they all want to deal with?
Meta: it's tricky to disagree with someone that presents a issue and adds "there will be denial about this."
Suddently, dissenting with the idea makes you feel like a denier. Either clever or mean.
You can't stop data collection, people will just do it in secret.
You can't stop murder either.
Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
The difference is that murder is detectable. If I collect data on your traffic and improve my software using that data, no one will know.
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It just must be illegal without real consent. See: GDPR.
Google/Twitter/Facebook are the same in EU. GDPR barely changes anything in this case.
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I see a lot of pseudonyms here, but this is why everyone should revert back to, or start using, pseudonyms online, and take as many privacy-enhancing precautions as reasonably possible.
I started building Owl Mail [1] about 8 weeks ago to make it easy to create incognito address for your online accounts. It's become an essential part of my privacy toolbox.
[1] https://owlmail.io
I am surprised that noone mentions the Solid project in the context of discussing privacy
https://solidproject.org/
this is particularly true for people who have international ties. you become subject to the social cooling mechanisms of very different cultures that may conflict with each other.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the irony that the ideology of the ‘radical’ punk scene is not too dissimilar to what is seen in corporate board rooms.
Funny anecdote: Foucault raised this issue because he didn't his intimate preferences to be made public. Now, on creating a whole theory on top of that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Also a similar website to raise privacy awareness https://theytrackyou.com
The social part of social media and culture have a much bigger impact on social cooling than anything else, including mass personal data collection.
Back in 2017, this was posted on HN, and I opened it as a tab on my iPhone. That tab is still open, and now the article is back here. Feels weird.
Replace "social" with "government" in all of these "social" systems, and everything become crystal clear.
If you hold right-of-centre views you definitely feel this already in all sorts of ways.
I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations.
You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list.
This website captures an element of that very well.
I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
Where can I see the data known about me?
You can go ask every individual company you interact with for what data they have about you. The details should be found in privacy polices.
Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
It seems the repeating topic which get's heated up again this time release of a documentary.
Stark Trek had a reputation based economy and it worked out pretty well, right?
everyone interesting is always one terrifying git commit away from automatically marrying their public account and their alt-throwaway from a machine-learning de-anonymizer. the less you write, the safer you are.
Good point. Would switching the language help? E.g. if you learned Spanish (secretly!) and used it only for the purpose of writing, will a de-anonimizer still work (typos, punctuation should be easy to automatically take care of)?
Being physically unattractive is also quite socially cooling
Interesting. Basically the premise of west world season 3.
Technologists need to build tools that are privacy-first.
They lost me at "Foucault raises the issue".
I think they are referring to the idea of "apparatus" from Michel Foucault.
From wikipedia: "I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositif
Actually I just meant to refer to Foucault's analysis of Bentham's panopticon prison concept.
I know what you're saying but you shouldn't just dismiss all of his thoughts. Yes, certain academics have abused, used, or selectively cherry picked pieces of this philosophy, in part, for turning academics into activism, but he'd probably turn in his grave regarding a lot of these developments. I mean he's against any sort of meta-narrative, for example.
I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages.
I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
How trite... Linking about social cooling to a site that refuses to let you purge your data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865
They claim you can ask. Then dang backpedals.
This is actually one of the few issues with this site. However, it's a major one.
So the call to action is, "Share this website?" Fail to see any value here.
Please tell me what I can DO about it, other than share sites like this while this happens.
This is legitimately scary to look at.
*burning oil
So I like this, its interesting and useful framing.
My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here.
Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win".
Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views).
Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most).
This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
Libertarian paradise.
Instead of yapping about how you "deactivated your Facebook account"; maybe you should do some inner reflection on how your work directly contributes to potentially making the world a worse place to live.
I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech.
All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
Social media is fast food. Cheap, easy, filling, tasty and very, very, very unhealthy. Eating it once in a while is fine, but eat it every day and you'll get sick.
Hacker News is also fast food, by the way. #deleteHN /s
You /s but I've found that I can consume HN content with roughly equal level of unhealthy interest that I consume reddit content
That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
If hacker news was food, to me it would be a sandwich, something you can eat while relaxing, or in a hurry, not too flavorful, and not too nutritious, but certainly the lesser evil of food-media.
The content is brilliant. Very, very, very well done. From engineering POV: I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies, that no resource was blocked by uBlock / nanoDefender / nextdns. Amazing. Just amazing. Such a rarity nowadays.
> I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies [...] Such a rarity nowadays.
Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!
So the website owners won't get proper analytics about who are their users, why they came to the website, how did they finish reading page to the end and so on. They won't know if their message was effective or not.
I'm the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That's all it has, and I'd argue it's enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling.
It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can't make a foolproof algorithm that'll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data.
There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/
And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.
I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
I agree. I particularly liked to see the ubiquitous Google Analytics was absent from the website.
Sometimes I feel like VCs, investors and corporate employers have some kind of control panel where they can look up individuals.
It happened to me several times that I had great conversations with investors or prospective employers but then from one day to the next they appeared to back off for no particular reason. I hold very contrarian political views so I'm not sure if it has something to do with this.
What unfortunate, baseless fear mongering this is.
> “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy”
This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
Millennia. Part of the slogan "city air makes free" is that city people knew and cared much less about one's private life than villagers.
Most of you only really believe in free speech (or any other exercise of power) when it conforms to, or reinforces your worldview.
And who's gathering this info?
Ahh, isralites! @lways has been
I do not support anyone in the US, I don't even live in the US.
But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
I lived too long in a country where only one opinion is allowed, and those who speak differently get problems, like get fired. It is not that bad in the US (yet?), of course.
This turned into a wretched flamewar. Not cool.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629941.
> > If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry
> But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. It means that when you start raving about the earth being flat or whatever, I can't shut you up. I can walk away, I can say "You're an idiot", and I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron", and then we can all say, "Hahaha! You're a moron! Neener neener" and so on and so forth. And you can do that to me.
I can even say "This guy is a flat Earther, don't buy his bread" and others can repeat it. That's freedom.
And if I do that I will, in practice, chill your speech because maybe you care about selling your bread more than you do about peddling flat Earthism. But that's what positive rights sometimes do.
And as someone with a strong view of individual freedom, I'd rather that chilling effect than any restriction on who I can speak out against.
Everyone has the freedom to bring mostly-negativity into the world, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them for it even when it's in support of issues I completely agree with.
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> Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you.
Nobody seriously cares about respect as much as about their freedom.
> I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron"
The sad fact is that you seem to only support freedom of express progressive ideas.
Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom of speech for that person.
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What are you all taking about?
Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.
I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.
I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.
If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?
All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.
That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done.
Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
Do you want to "speak consciously" on WeChat or risk facing the consequences of your "responsibility" in front a Chinese Communist Party court?
The very same tools that can enable your utopia can also very quickly turn into a dystopia. As you say, they are a powerful magnifier, transforming this world into a global village where every action has far-reaching unpredictable consequences. This means that we should be incredibly cautious when deploying these tools as they give great power to users and an even greater power to their makers.
No I think you still don't get it.
Speaking consciously on WeChat means being conscious of all the consequences of your actions including with regard to your relationship as an individual to the state. I'm very happy to adopt that consciously, and have tried to be aware of these things and I have no problem with that at all.
Just like I'm not going to say something to hurt the feelings of and make trouble for the family that's invited me to have dinner at their house, I'm not going to say things to hurt the feelings of a whole people, and double so when I'm a guest. And I'll try considering the unique culture of a place and how appropriate types of criticism, before opening my mouth. And triple so when I'm a guest with a megaphone.
Would you?
I consider doing it in a less considerate way is not very empathetic but also it's not good for me. It's self-destructive so I think people adopting this attitude under some misguided sort of heroic mythology are, stupid.
I'm okay speaking in more critical terms about countries where open criticism of their systems is culture. But even then there are lines. Assange, Snowden, went too far. To me, ignoring for a second the possibility they are limited hangout psyops, they are stupid men. Useful idiots, whose idealism, whether initially designed or not, had been co-opted by the states they posture at critiquing.
And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
But the unexpected benefit of this for me was I actually got a deeper understanding of different places unique ways and thinking, precisely because I deliberately withheld judgement and tried to look at things from multiple perspectives, not just from my inherited Western biases, which I consciously tried to be aware of and see more than.
So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
I don't think it's very empathetic for people to say, well Western culture do it this way therefore we should impose our cultural values on others.
But... these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks you have in Western countries basically equate to the social credit system in China, when you think about job opportunities, freedom of movement, access to capital, freedom from harassment and intimidation.
For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I don't understand what people find so difficult about the level of consideration that is just like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect, who am I to judge others? but I think in the West it harkens back to some sort of anti authoritarian distrust of the state.
Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
If you meant or were trying to confuse it deliberately with the survey tools then they are not what makes the world a village. They just enhance the watchers.
I agree we need to watch for dystopias and avoid them, but are you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
I think we need to watch, and learn from both places. Neither is a dystopia right now. But neither is perfect either. What's important is to learn, improve, and not think you've already achieved the pinnacle of civilization, nor take it for granted that you'll get there. You have to keep learning from what others are doing and inventing improvements. I just don't think framing the debate as privacy versus almost everything else is a very useful way forward.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one even though it's kind of hackneyed. The world really should get more open and connected and I think eventually the relationship between people and their states should become closer. In my intimate relationships I get privacy by what I choose not to disclose. In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. There's still a lot there... I think with the externalization of minds onto devices people are forgetting the power of their own brain and their own emotions.
What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things. But then again maybe I'm wrong and if I was in that situation I'd probably just make the best of it and think well what can I still enjoy and how can I adopt myself to fit in with where I'm at. But I think the reality is that when world Government comes it will be something that is tolerant of regional differences because that will be how a world government has to be introduced that's the only sort of way it's possible.
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Regardless of the content I really don't like this website. I don't appreciate having to scroll so much and PgUp/PgDown don't move between the blocks smoothly.
Disicigoekwbzb
sorry to say, but in this day and age with "cancel culture", "over sensitive millennials" and "non-binary morons" you have to restrict yourself or you get attacked and down voted or booted off (as my account now will). there is no such thing as free speech or expressing yourself, if you view doesn't fit the politically correct climate of the day. Just yesterday i had to tell someone not to gaslight another commenter because they felt the other commenter was offending OP. You can't even say "he/she" or "black/white" anymore without being sculled by someone since it might be insensitive. Honestly, this is the wonderful word we live in now and the author wants just to not be afraid to speak our minds and take risks???
I wonder how historically true it is that people had an ability to voice unpopular opinions without social consequence.
My parents are from the Soviet Union, so that example comes to mind most readily. Obviously speech was heavily restricted and policed in that time and place; a relative was briefly thrown in jail for handing out pro-democracy leaflets in the late 80s. My wife's family is from China, another country with a history of policing speech. There is a wonderful book called "The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" which talks about the negative consequences of seemingly innocuous speech during the Cultural Revolution.
Lest people think I only have examples from overseas, when I was growing up here, I found that criticizing religion, even lightly, was problematic. Organized religion was something of a sacred cow until perhaps the early 2000s. I have gay friends, and coming to their support in the late 90s and early 2000s was difficult, with the majority of opposition coming from the religious community.
After 2001, criticizing the war on terror lead many public figures to be deplatformed (or canceled in modern terms). An example of this is the MSNBC host Phil Donahue [1]. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "support the troops not the war" slogan to try to get around these issues, with mixed success.
Maybe folks who are older than me can compare the attitudes now with other historical periods, but I don’t believe it’s more difficult now to vocalize an unpopular opinion than it used to be.
[1]: https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...
I read history parts of civil rights movements in America. What I found was that any white who would support desegregation was ostracised and punished by whites.
Look, there has never been a part of history when you could be an unrestricted asshole and say whatever you want without consequences. Never. People have always been snowflakes. How about when people used to duel to the death over an insult? Your only solace is that before the internet and TV and mass communication, you could only be an asshole to your local community members.
Now, you have the power of being an unrestricted asshole to a larger audience than ever before. This, unsurprisingly, has even more consequences. In addition, this audience is more diverse than ever, with different opinions, backgrounds, upbringings, preferences, etc. Yes, just as always, there are people who are offended.
And just as always, you have to know your audience. Just like in the past, you wouldn't go to the local aristocrat and talk shit to them, you should know better than to go on Twitter and talk shit. Find your friend group, and say what you want with them. Like you always could. If you can't, find different friends.
People really underestimate how much power is given to them to have a near infinite audience on social media. But that power goes both ways.
you're proving my point perfectly.
i didn't say anything about being an "unrestricted asshole", racist, insulting or attacking anyone deliberately. i simply stated that if you're not in line with the PC terms dejour of the week, you run the risk of being ostracized. you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
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Can't help but be reminded of Justine Sacco’s infamous tweet. The joke a frankly terrible attempt at irony, but my read was that she had intended to poke fun at racists. Sacco not only lost her job over it but had to endure weeks of death threats and threats of rape. People of course moved on but I do recall one journalist describing what he saw when he interviewed her for his book on public shaming. A sad shell of a human being with emotional scarring she'll have to endure for the rest of her life. Data is only one part of the problem.
Free speech is also saying you are a dick when you are acting like one, or does the buck stop when you are the one who get offended?
Fools names and fools faces are often seen in public places.. or something like that.
Wokeness = the new Puritan era.
Cool article.
In a similar vein, by the same author: https://www.mathwashing.com/
(It's linked at the bottom of this one, but I'm sure a lot of people don't get that far)
That is my number one pissing point right now in higher education.
Every company has a predictive algorithm to use on students. Every startup that's stepping into the space is pushing the data and data scientists.
But they all have the same-old, usually decades old, baked in biases. AND they're not doing anything to address it!
Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not biased. I hate it more than anything professionally, right now.
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It takes years and years of training in advanced dialectic bullshit to get to the point where you can say, with a straight face, that math is morally wrong. It's utterly absurd to demand that we censor models and worsen their output to conform to some activist's idealized imagine of how the world should be. Only by letting models report the true facts of the world as it is can we optimize for human happiness.
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This article links at the bottom to similarly-styled piece about "mathwashing", the idea that it's morally wrong for an algorithm to notice true facts about reality. That idea is utter bunk, and so likely is "Social Cooling" as well. Both pushes are really about unelected activists trying to limit other people's technology to bring about their peculiar idea of Utopia.
In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
Men commit more violent offenses than women. Should I, a man, be turned down for a job because of this despite never having committed a violent offense? No woman has ever won the US presidency, should we therefore divert funds away from female candidates because they are provably less likely to win? If after doing that for a century and no woman has yet to win, should we still continue to divert funds away from them? I hope the answers to these questions are obviously "no, we shouldn't." If data-driven decisions are equally problematic but hide it behind layers of apparently justifiable (and often opaque) mathematics, then we have a problem.
the problem isn't necessarily with _accurate_ data and math, but with reductive statistics that paint with broad brushes. Statistics inherently remove nuance, which is fine when the nuance is unimportant to what you're measuring, but not when it's actually important.
The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.
Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
You missed the point. The point is that you can be doing the wrong math on the wrong data, jumping to completely baseless and detrimental conclusions. You cannot judge the needs of the many by the actions of the few or vice versa.
>In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated "social credit score". This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends.
This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust"
EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
It's extremely different. It's so so so so different.
The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).
It's a difference of degree and monopoly on violence.
... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.
I don't think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there's no incentive for them to do so.
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It's the number associated with my bank account that dictates how much I can travel, where I can live, what kind of education I can get, and even whether I can eat. This is pervasive throughout modern civilization. China's social credit system is trivial in comparison.
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It's a slower slide, but over time this information is centralised into a fewer and fewer large data brokers, what the scores means will become standardised across industries meaning eventually there will be no escape by going to competitors. This enables companies to start charging based on automatically generated risk profiles, some of which will end up being generated based on political preference (or proxies for it) Eventually this means that people with bad scores will be unable to afford certain things in the same way that they have trouble accessing credit. Credit scores are just the beginning.
For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, 'logically', you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.
And if they don't do this directly, they will do it by proxy in the same way that the insurance industry has been using proxies for race. https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2020/07/23/insurance-re...
It's a sort of insurance-ification of all pricing and permission which this kind of technology is increasingly enabling.
They’re based on your behavior using that service, though, not your generalized loyalty to the state.
This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it's not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.
Though to be fair, the part of America which most resembles the Chinese government isn't the American government, but American corporations.
This is also not new, this reminds me of the early days of eBay with user ratings impacting your ability to buy / sell goods (especially as a new account).
>elsewhere across the world
In the US you mean.
I'm not sure how you gathered that this is what they meant. Do people not review services outside of the US? (hint: they do)